Archive
Hitler, the Holocaust, gas chambers, Nazis, concentration camps — these all loom large in our contemporary cultural consciousness. They call forth strong feelings and evoke vivid imagery. At the same time, it is no longer surprising to encounter cheap comparisons to them. It happens all the time: You’re walking down the street, on your way to […]
Ways To Make Counting The Omer The Best Experience Of Your Life: Think about the unlimited cheese cake and ice cream that await you. Take time to appreciate the ephemerality of life Make music out of the silence (but don’t enjoy it too much) Hang out with the Simpsons and learn a lot of “fun” […]
It has been pointed out that director Steven Spielberg’s mainstream success has inspired a turn toward broad, “public interest” works. For Spielberg, pop-history and film preservation have taken precedent over purely artistic endeavors. If one were to mark this shift in Spielberg’s career, it likely started with the Holocaust drama “Schindler’s List,” for which the […]
When I was in my Holocaust phase—and by that I mean the years I spent consuming every book about the Holocaust I could find, wildly curious about my own family’s personal Holocaust stories—I was transfixed by one person in particular: my grandfather’s brother, Todris. Both of my mother’s parents are survivors, and both had many […]
We’re proud to announce our first ever Middle School/High School Israel Essay Contest. Every summer, thousands of high schoolers pile onto tour buses to traipse around the Holy Land. Some travelers return home spiritually awakened, others with a new view of Israel’s political climate. They come back full of ideas, angst and passion. And New […]
Now that Passover is over and we have 376 days to recuperate, it’s high time we make fun of that which is too real and dire to be funny during the holiday: the Passover snacks we swallow all too readily for 8 days a year. Our parents tell us all they had were those frightening […]
This year’s four-day J Street U Student Summit in Washington, D.C. was followed shortly by both the Passover holiday and President Obama’s quick trip to the Holy Land – yet the organization’s student leadership made a pointed effort to avoid the low-hanging fruit of the Passover metaphor. However, many an interlocutor capitalized on the intersection […]
Ever read the Bible cover to cover? Think it’s a bit strange so much of our society is built by a book most people never read in its entirety? Listen to one little podcast, and your relationship to this all-pervasive text may change radically. Enter OMGWTFBIBLE. Each month on this monthly podcast, a guest reads […]
From the mound of peeling matzah box empties, it looked like a massive Passover seder was brewing. Instead, Ambacht Brewery co-owner Tom Kramer was tossing the discarded boxes to the brewery floor after adding crushed up matzoh to a bubbling mash of soon-to-be Matzobraü Beer. Matzobraü beer is the after-Passover brew of a two-room brewhouse […]
It’s a challenge to have anything feel new and exciting after a few times of doing it. In a conversation that usually arises within the context of prayer, those of us who perform religious ceremonies often bemoan the impossibility of connecting emotionally to that which so easily becomes rote and stale with repetition. The same […]